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The European Space Agency (ESA) will accompany the NASA DART spacecraft that will collide with the sun-bleached rock surface as part of a heroic effort to find out if the asteroid can be diverted from its precious waltz around the earth. Speaking of Europe's contribution to an international test of global defense, astrophysicist Brian May said: "If we want to know if it is possible to deviate Didymos, it will be very difficult. Aim for a target 160 meters wide over millions of kilometers of empty space.
"Could we stop an asteroid hitting the planet Earth?
"The dinosaurs could not.
"But we humans benefit from knowledge and science from our side!"
To give us an idea of the size of the near-Earth danger, Mr. May said, "Imagine a rock the size of a mountain with another rock the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
"The Hera spacecraft will show us things we have never seen before.
"It will be humanity's first spaceship to visit a double asteroid."
Didymos could be on a collision course with the earth (Image: GETTY)
DART satellite and impact operation (Image: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)
Meteor Crater Arizona (Image: GETTY)
Hera is the first step to help ESA determine if it would be possible to deflect such an asteroid during a collision with the Earth.
The mission will revolutionize our understanding of asteroids and how to protect ourselves from them, and could therefore be crucial to safeguarding our planet.
First, NASA will crush its DART spacecraft into the smaller asteroid, Didymoon, before ESA 's Hera comes to map the resulting impact crater and measure the mass of the asteroid.
Hera will ship two CubeSats, which will fly much closer to the surface of the asteroid and carry out crucial scientific studies before touching the ground.
Hera's close sightings will turn asteroid deflection into a well-understood planetary defense technique.
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An object close to the Earth (Image: An object close to the Earth)
The Hera mission will be presented at ESA's Space19 + meeting in November, during which European Space Ministers will make a final decision on the mission, as part of the European Union's broader global defense initiatives. Agency to protect European and global citizens.
DART will then hit the smallest asteroid, about 160 meters long, "nine times faster than a bullet, about 3.7 km per second," according to a statement.
Lindley Johnson, a planetary defense officer at NASA's headquarters in Washington, said, "The DART would be NASA's first mission to demonstrate what is known as the kinetic strike technique striking the asteroid to move its orbit so to defend against a future impact of asteroids.
"This approval step moves the project toward a historic test with a small, non-threatening asteroid."
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Didymos closely (Image: ESA)
The double asteroid could move towards the Earth (Image: ESA)
The full mission is called AIDA and will be managed by ESA and NASA.
AIDA will target 65803 Didymos, a system of binary asteroids in which an asteroid is put into orbit by a smaller one.
The primary asteroid is about 800 m in diameter.
Its small satellite is about 150 m in diameter in an orbit about one mile from the primary satellite.
Fortunately, Didymos is not an asteroid crossing the Earth and there is no possibility that the deviation experience could create a risk of impact.
Mineral value of asteroids (Image: Express)
The proposed mission of the European Space Agency will map data from the asteroid hijacked after the impact of the DART probe.
The Hera spacecraft will perform a high resolution mapping of the resulting impact crater.
Patrick Michel, director of research at the Cote d'Azur Observatory, France, said: "The current relationship between projectile size, speed and crater size in low-impact environments gravity is still poorly understood.
"Having both Small Baggage Impactor (SCI) and Hera data on crater size in two different impact speed regimes will provide crucial information.
"These scaling laws are also crucial in practical terms because they underlie the way in which our calculations for estimating the efficiency of asteroid deflection are performed, taking into account account for the properties of the asteroid material as well as the speed of impact involved.
Didymos could be on a collision course with Earth (Image: GETTY)
"That's why Hera is so important, we will not only have the complete test of the asteroid deflection in the DART space, but also the detailed follow-up by Hera to discover the composition and structure of Didymoon.
"Hera will also record the precise shape of the DART crater, up to the nearest centimeter.
"Thus, by relying on this Hayabusa2 impact experiment, DART and Hera will further bridge the gap between asteroid deflection techniques, bringing us to a point where such a method could actually be used. "
Didymoon will easily be the smallest asteroid ever explored, which means that the spatial rock will better understand the cohesion of materials in an environment of negligible gravity – more than a million times weaker than that of the Earth.
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